paloma's journal

it's been about a week and a half since i started house/dog sitting, and i've got a few days left before i pack up to return to my own house. there are some upsides and downsides to the current situation. i will start with the pros:

• the house i'm staying in is in a forested area and under tree cover that keeps temperatures cool and feels cozy and natural. (it's still the suburbs — the woods don't extend far — but it's enough to give the appearance of nature, at least.)
• the ambient sounds of the nighttime are accordingly very loud. i assume it's mostly crickets, other insects, and frogs, but they kind of blend together into a harmonious buzz that i find very calming. i think i also sleep better than in my own area of residence, which is more urban.
• i got to usurp my friend's CSA share, so i now have huge amounts of amazingly fresh vegetables.
• although i don't eat many eggs, the few i have eaten from the chickens here were very good. they make grocery store eggs look pathetic (which, let's be honest, they usually are anyway).
• since my friend whose house i'm in is a neighbor of the art studio where i work, i can walk to work.
• i have a lot of alone time, which is a nice change of pace.

and for the sake of completeness, i will also list the downsides. however, i am being paid to stay here and care for the animals, so i'm not complaining at all; more just noticing and recording.

• there are a fuck ton of mosquitoes here, which make it nigh impossible to be outside for long without repellent.
• caring for animals can be tiring. even if you yourself have had an exhausting day, or just want to sleep in, they always have their needs which are non-optional. also, sometimes they are very annoying (i still love them, but it's true).
• i miss my own house, my ergonomic desks, and my partner's cooking.
• one of the chickens actually died this past weekend. apparently she was quite old, so it was natural, but i had to transport her to a place where she could return to the food web without being in range of any dogs.
• despite the relaxing forest atmosphere and the nighttime forest sounds, i've been sleeping oddly. i'm guessing it's related to the change of environment, but i've had some strange dreams that have left me feeling out of sorts, which sometimes translates to a weird mood in the morning and feeling a little bit more stressed out than i normally do.

i've also been juggling a few different things, between the animals, my job (in which i'm working on some things which are a little more complicated than usual), and finishing the latest digital snippet for av club by the end of the month. so it's not just because of one thing. but i'm not normally very stressed out or moody (at least most of the time), so i would like to just feel normal please! perhaps getting some extra sleep will help.

anyway, yes, i finished and published the second digital snippet for av club yesterday! a good chunk of the post is publicly accessible, so you can check it out even if you are not a member: avclub.palomakop.tv/freqPhaseMod i made a demo video for it, which i just finished over the weekend, and involved a bunch of recording and editing. i put it off for a while because i wasn't really sure how to execute it, but now that i've done it once i think it will be easier in the future, if i ever make more things that require a demo video. the web demo and touchDesigner component were both finished a while ago, but the video and putting it all together was a significant chunk of effort. i am happy with the results though!

in between working on that, i also hung out with my partner (who's still staying over at our apartment), went hiking next to a lush stream and waterfall, and visited some nice friends who invited us to dinner at their house. the first three photos below are from our hike; the last photo is of a flower that randomly showed up in my backyard (i guess it somehow grew in between the two fences and just decided to poke out and say hello).

one more thing: i mentioned in my last post that i learned more about email at work and was able to apply it to my own setup. well, i actually surprisingly ended up learning even more about email since then, and now i'm running a self-hosted DMARC monitoring tool and getting live updates on the authentication status of a handful of sending domains, and i'm well on my way to fearlessly setting a p=reject policy. from being afraid to move off gmail years ago because my messages might go to spam, i have officially become a self-declared Email Power User. this is after already having a pretty good setup for a while... but i've learned things that i didn't know were there to learn, and now things that seemed mysterious no longer seem so. ask me about DKIM, SPF, DMARC, DNS, SMTP, IMAP, POP, headers, spoofing, reputation, bounces... and i will answer you! not to brag. in the end, email is just more complicated than i expected, and not something i set out to become "good" at, or thought required a separate skill from systems administration and web stuff in general.

ok, that's enough of ranting about email. i think i've about covered everything that's going on. which i guess has been kind of a lot. time to start getting ready for an early bedtime. bye for now...

this week and the next, i am house sitting for my friend ashley. she and her family are traveling, and i am staying at their house and taking care of their two dogs while they're gone. they also have a number of chickens (enough that i'm not sure exactly how many there are), but those are pretty low maintenance.

one of the dogs is the sister of thor, my dog at work. so i've been bringing her over to play with her brother when i'm working. she isn't as well trained as thor, but they keep each other occupied and seem content with spending all day outside in the yard. the other dog i'm watching is an old yellow lab who seems relieved to be left alone during the day without her younger roommate there to annoy her.

last night, i went back over to my actual house because andrei was hosting an open studio type thing in our garage (as seen in the attached photo). the idea was that since our home studios aren't really big enough to host in, they set up some video art equipment in the garage instead. this involved running an extension cord out there, since our garage is just an open, free-standing cinder block structure with no power (or even a door that closes). a few people came over and were playing with the video equipment, but then i had to leave to go feed the dogs.

what else is happening? in no particular order...

• i finished playing cyberpunk 2077. since i played most of it over the winter and then came back to it again later, it took me like 11 months to finish. i don't normally spend much time playing video games, but i do enjoy them. last year, i played baldur's gate 3 over a similar amount of time, and before then, i re-played skyrim (which i first played when it was released). i have some lists of other games i'd like to play in my media diary app that i built the other week, but i'm giving it some time before i start a new one.

• i also haven't really started a new book, besides a book of short stories in spanish, which hasn't really captured me.

• i am watching the tv show la casa de las flores, also in spanish, which is kind of dumb, but also quite entertaining, and definitely good for practicing spanish. i'm watching it in spanish with spanish subitles, and while i can't understand every word people are saying, the overall story is easy to follow, especially because of the overdramatic nature of the show. i've been chipping away at the first season quite quickly while house sitting.

• i've had some longstanding issues with sending video signals between my modular video synth and my computer, which i think i've finally solved. this unfortunately involved spending a chunk of money, which violated my "no new gear" rule that i've otherwise followed pretty faithfully for the past few years. i ironed out my signal flow between multiple converters to get from hdmi to analog component and vice versa, and i got a new encoder module (lzx esg3) that has a built-in proc amp that solves a compatibility dilemma i had. it's a long story, but when working with external video signals in the modular, i no longer have to choose between having the levels be way too hot or having my image wiggle back and forth horizontally due to sync drift. and next time i perform live video, i'll no longer need to carry a full size video mixer (roland v4ex) with me just to convert from component to hdmi.

• i'm working on another digital snippet for AV club, to be shared this coming weekend!

• every time i think i understand everything there is to know about setting up email accounts, authenticating domains, and sending and receiving emails, i learn something new. most recently, this resulted from some stuff i had to do at work, but i was able to improve my own weird, bespoke email setup based on what i learned. i'm quite happy with my personal setup, since i've de-googled as much as possible as of this year. it may seem arbitrary, but i passionately hate the gmail web app UI.

• andrei and i went to see a new movie, hot spot, in theaters. it was divisive; i enjoyed it, andrei did not. i wouldn't say it was good necessarily, but i thought it was cool that a film like that was actually playing in theaters. it was sci-fi/fantasy, stylized, surreal, atmospheric, Polish, and had full frontal nudity and a very thin plot. i think it's worth a watch, though parts of it move slowly. i was surprised andrei disliked it as much as they did, since we both liked watching art films like after blue (2019) at angelika when we lived in brooklyn.

• the mosquitoes have been pretty brutal due to all the rain we've been getting, but i've still managed to get some hiking in. i am starting to feel an inking of autumn coming on; it's even been kind of chilly here some nights.

that's all i can think of for now. since i'm house sitting, it's simultanously busier (feeding and managing these animals) but also less eventful than usual. i'm having a good time here, but i also will be glad to be back in my own house when the time comes.

this morning, we went to a large state park to the east of us which is on a peninsula in the long island sound. it wasn't super hot, so instead of swimming we walked around the trails and looked at birds through our binoculars. we don't really know that much about identifying birds or specific types of birds, we just find it entertaining to look at them. it turned out that a number of other people had the same idea of how and where to spend their sunday morning, and we crossed paths with a few of them along the way. it seems to me that people who are into birds are very talkative when they see other people walking around with binoculars. one lady said to us, "i think you just get to a certain age, and then the birds find you. and then you suddenly realize, 'i've become a bird person!'"

afterwards, we lurked around in the nearby towns and went to a bookshop, cafe, thrift store, and grocery store. it was a nice day out and about.

aside from today's outing, i spent most of this weekend making myself a media tracking system for keeping track of what books, movies, shows, and games i want to read/watch/play, are in progress, or have finished, and write notes or ratings and make lists of stuff. it was one of those things that i'm sometimes tempted to do but also have to resist the urge to do for responsible time management reasons. well, after looking around and not finding any existing self-hosted apps that seemed like they did what i wanted, i decided to just go for it this time, and i'm glad i did.

it pulls metadata from open library, tmdb, and steam to allow for quickly adding things, but all the data for the items in my library is stored locally. i started by copying the repo for this journal, since it's also a single-tenant flask app with an sqlite database. but the interface is more dynamic, so i used htmx. i decided not to share the code, because it's very tailored to me personally and isn't very polished, but it does seem to work and does everything i wanted it to do!

i was able to migrate in the data from the past few years of text files where i've been writing down books and movies i've finished or want to get, so now i can use it to add new things as i go. and it didn't really take all that long, and i think it will be very useful to me for a long time to come. it's now running on the same raspberry pi as this journal, and though it's accessible to me from outside my home network, nothing is visible unless i'm logged in. it's purely for my own organizational and memory purposes.

besides that, i've been working on something to share for AV club this month, and that's mostly it. i went to the city last weekend for a thing that ended up not happening, so it was mostly a waste of time. i started playing cyberpunk 2077 again, which i played 90% of over the winter and then stopped. so i decided to finally go back in and finish it. we went to the movies, and walked in the park. it rained a lot, and continues to do so. i dunno, pretty normal stuff. don't have a lot of commentary there, things are generally going pretty well and moving forward. i'm going to be house sitting and caring for two dogs for two weeks at the end of this month, so i need to get ready to not live in my own house for a little bit — but on the other hand, i'll have more solitude for a bit (from other humans, not from dogs though) so i will think about how to best use that time.

oh! and we played a show last week. haha, i totally forgot about that. but i did write about it on my blog.

image is a sneak peek of something i'm making for AV club.

the past two weeks have been pretty good, and somewhat uneventful. i created the first digital snippet for my new "av club," which was an illustrated written piece about my recent projects to create a virtual video oscillator in GLSL that can be modulated in the same way as my analog ones. i also submitted a version of it to be included in the "signal culture cookbook" e-book project. so a lot of my time was occupied by working on that and finishing it up. other than that, we went to the movies twice, did some biking around town and went to the barcade and a local show, and i visited the warehouse for the AV company i work for to be trained on the video switcher rigs that i will use as a Video Operator (new freelancing mode unlocked!)

i also started reading a new book, the faith of beasts, the second in a new series in progress. i had been resisting the urge to start a new fiction book because i knew i'd get super sucked in, and i was correct. it is good though!!

at the same time, despite being relatively IRL-focused and feeling good about my immediate situation, i've come across things somewhat frequently that make me feel concerned, creeped out, pessimistic, and/or disgusted. as much as i would like to avoid talking about this topic, (content warning!) it's about the whole LLMs thing and the asinine happenings that are occurring every day, though i only hear about a small fraction of them, due to being somewhat of a hermit.

here are some of the things that have happened and are concerning to me...

i have come across text that was ostensibly published by people and organizations i respect, but which i could tell was not fully (if at all) written by them. this happened multiple times, and while there is no definitive proof that it was written by AI (it was not labeled as such and contained accurate information overall), the style was nauseatingly artificial. i value written communication and i'm very sensitive to writing style. i may be somewhat of a grammar nerd, but i don't mind when people make errors. it gives writing texture and personality. what i do mind, so much more, is a complete lack of personality and texture. call me old fashioned, or call me a snob because arguably, i am a "skilled" writer (not that this journal entry necessarily shows it). but i feel enraged by the fact that a) people i thought were cool would publish that kind of text under their own name, b) they felt either unwilling or not confident in their own writing style to do it themselves, and c) that they expect other people to read this. i also now feel uncomfortably hypervigilant and sensitive because i'm on the lookout for signs all the time of AI-generated text, after the repeated disappointment of realizing something was when i was partway through reading it.

in other related news, i have come across examples and stories about people connecting AI agents to the internet and giving them autonomy to do things such as posting on community forums, sending emails, finding vulnerabilities in libre software tools... now, i am a millennial, and i'm used to the internet being a sketchy place, but it's becoming a lot sketchier in a new way that is slightly horrifying. again, i feel i have to be hypervigilant to protect against either being taken in by a nonhuman entity pretending to be a person, or having my digital infrastructure be compromised by some new unforeseen hacking exploit. the honest truth is, for someone who runs a handful of web servers, i don't feel all that confident in my abilities as a system administrator. i take a rather laid back approach, since i'm just one person with a lot of projects and stuff has mostly worked up until this point. i do my best, and i keep backups and stuff, but more and more i find myself wishing for a tiny local internet where all my servers can live safely isolated from the larger internet. sadly, that would also mean that no one but me could access any of the services, and many of the services would be much less useful. (examples: community forum, video hosting, chat server... what are these without a public connection? can i set it all aside and do everything by trading flash drives in the mail or something??)

but even before all this recent stuff happened, i already felt like there were a lot of reasons to avoid the distractions and neurochemical hijacking of many parts of the internet. so i'm just about tempted to call it a day and just pull the plug, to hell with the consequences to my life. (i'm not even sure what "pulling the plug" looks like — we will see if that urge finds any reasonable outlet, lol.)

so, anyway, i needed to make this rant. i don't really know where i'm going with all this, but it's just about the only thing bothering me. well, i suppose it's part of a larger context of the social, cultural, and economic situation right now, especially in the US, which is also kind of nauseating. so, there's some amount of mental distress that i am working through around it all. i'm not sure if i personally need to do anything specific about it, and if so, what that would be yet...

well, life goes on. and overall, things are going pretty well for me personally. given how things have been going the past few years, a bit of existential panic underlying everyday life is nothing new. it comes and goes though, and right now it's very much present.

anyway, i have to go to bed now!

earlier this week, i worked an AV gig that was located on the hundredth floor of a building in manhattan. i took a lot of photos up there.

last week, i was on semi-vacation and did a lot of patching in touchdesigner for week of patching. i wasn't able to post every day, but i did 5/7, and got a lot more comfortable with the program, which was the main goal. now that i have a better understanding of its functionality, i think it will be very useful to me in the future, but i also see where its limitations are. i am realizing that i will still need to get better at writing shader code to accomplish everything i want to digitally — but touchdesigner also makes working with shaders easier. and of course there is still plenty more to explore.

on saturday, we hiked up a mountain called "sleeping giant," and on sunday, we went to my partner's sister's birthday party, and swam in their lake.

on my return from my city trip this week, the sky got very smoky from wildfires somewhere, and it looked like the sun was a small orange orb barely visible through the gray atmosphere.

that's all for now. till next time...

this morning, i walked to the coffee shop, intending to sit there for a bit and plan out the rest of my day. i brought my backpack, but it turned out that i forgot to pack the e-ink device i usually use for taking notes.

thankfully, i had this little contraption in my pocket (well, technically, in my fanny pack, because i don't like to transfer things between clothing pockets all the time). i would call it my pocket notebook, but in truth, it's not really a notebook at all. it is a couple of leaves of warm-colored cardstock, cut down to 5.5 by 6 inches, and center-folded with the paper's grain. instead of actually binding them into a notebook, i just secure them to a piece of thicker cardboard with a rubber band, and a pen tucked in as well. the cardboard is cut down from some random packaging, with an extra quarter inch of margin on each side.

this little bundle of papers was the result of a long quest and some trial and error. but in the end, this specific method has won over all of the pre-made notebooks and pads i've tried, as well as my other hand-bound notebook experiments. it may not be perfect for everyone, but it's perfect for me for the following reasons:

• the cardstock is thick enough for me to use both sides with no bleed-through, and is pleasant to write on.
• individual leaves are better than a binding for me because it takes the pressure off — if i draw something terrible that i never want to look at again, i can simply remove that leaf from the stack. (in regular notebooks, i often either rip stuff out, or just don't use them because i don't want to "mess them up.")
• if i have a table or flat surface to write on, the leaves can be unfolded to their full size, and lay flatter than most notebooks.
• if i don't have a flat surface, i just remove the rubber band and use the cardstock itself as a rigid backing.
• the cardboard keeps the whole thing flat so the rubber band doesn't curl the paper. it also provides a little bit of protection against the corners getting bent in my pocket.
• it's extremely lightweight.
• it's modular — all of the pieces come apart and can be replaced individually.
• if i leave the whole thing behind by accident, i can make a new one in a few minutes, for a total cost of a dollar or two.

i use it to doodle when hanging out with people or waiting for food at a restaurant. i also use it for writing things down when i'm away from my larger bags and items. it helps me avoid looking at my smartphone, which i feel is rude in social situations, and which i often dislike using when alone as well. (any notebook can be a good alternative to certain types of screen time, but if it's not one i actually want to carry with me all the time, it doesn't help with this.)

i usually carry three blank folded sheets with me at a time, and i have a stack of extras pre-cut on the shelf, so i can swap out the used notes with new blanks. depending on what's on the used notes, i usually don't need them anymore. the process of writing or sketching is important to me, as a form of synthesis. most of the artifacts become irrelevant quickly, or i copy down the information somewhere else if i need it for later. but if i ever end up with a bunch i want to keep, i could easily add a pamphlet stitch to bind them into a real book.

after my rabbit hole of trial and error, i settled on this method and just... stopped thinking about it. i kept using it, and began to take its presence for granted. i only thought of it again today because it saved my butt as i sat down in the coffee shop, writing my to-do list. so this is a note of appreciation for my little "notebook," and also a note about the particular specs that worked for me.

the other photos are from my walk through the cemetery, which is between me and the coffee shop.

it rained all day today. i kept thinking that the sky must run out of water, but it still hasn't.

i decided to write again today because i randomly remembered two scenes from recent dreams:

• last night, in my dream, i saw a UFO with my eyes open. i was afraid at first because i thought it was falling, towards me, but then it zoomed up and away. then it like melted away and i realized that i had been dreaming, but thought i was awake now. (but i was still dreaming, my eyes weren't really open...i was still just looking at the dream world). looking back, missed opportunity for lucid dreaming, which is usually triggered by realizing you're dreaming. but i thought i had woken up already, and seeing a UFO didn't seem that crazy to me at the time. therein lies the difficulty of realizing i am dreaming.
• the other night, not sure when exactly, i dreamed i was in a public swimming pool area that i'd reached just by walking down the street. there was no gate, just a swimming pool and public bathrooms with showers, accessible right from the sidewalk. i remember thinking, "europe is so much more advanced." i guess the dream was set in europe, maybe only because i assumed i must be there because of the nice pool (not sure if that's a logical conclusion).

today, i got started on my touch designer patching for "week of patching." i ended up staying up late, and spending more time on the computer than i normally do, and feeling a bit mentally scattered. i am looking forward to doing more patching this week, but i hope i can avoid the scattered attention that comes along with spending more time on social media and youtube and doing too many little things in a short time.

i am writing another entry because things have been pretty eventful. yesterday we went to a friend's house for a fourth of july party (it's the anniversary of the founding of the united states, though most people reading this will know that). the fourth of july is, somewhat ironically, also the anniversary of my relationship with my lovely partner andrei. (eight years, wow!) anyway, i was worried because i knew the party was going to be outside (our friend lives on the beach), but it turned out to be fine. it was slightly cooler (only 90 degrees, lol), there was shade, and it turns out that swimming in the ocean cools you down a lot. that's something humans have probably known for a long time, so i felt sort of silly that it was a revelation to me.

we hung out with people, and ate turkish food and a tasty frozen dessert that andrei made, with frozen bananas, peanut butter, and chocolate on a nut-flour shortbread. as we left the party near sundown, we saw a gathering storm on the horizon. on the drive home, we were just in time to catch a glimpse of every fireworks display between new haven and shoreline. there were a lot of different ones, and we stopped a couple times briefly to watch. on the bridge over the bay, they were setting them off on the shore right below, and they were exploding right above us. with my car's roof open, it felt slightly dangerous to be that close to the explosions, though the biggest danger was probably people being distracted while driving.

as if that was not dramatic enough, less than a mile from our house, a monsoon-level amount of rain started pouring down, and i had to pull over and wait until i could see literally anything through the windshield. when we finally turned onto our block, we had to drive through a few inches of water flooding the road. today, i saw a lot of leaves on the ground (green ones), and some terrifyingly large branches that had fallen (one sycamore branch was like a foot in diameter).

the nice thing is that the rain coincided with the heat wave breaking. though i normally wouldn't call this weather cool, it was a welcome shift, and we celebrated by going on a walk in the morning. we stopped by a local cafe and then the farmers' market.

now, i'm at the community art space because my partner and our friends are doing a closing performance for the group video art exhibition. i biked over here and now i'm waiting for it to start.

in between these things, i've been doing a bit of computery stuff. i'm preparing for my week of patching, which starts tomorrow! i created a log page to track my experiments, which is blank now but will be added to soon. and i also documented the final items i made for zine club, and wrote a blog post about zine club ending and AV club beginning. so it's been "officially" announced now.

tomorrow, i'm working during the day, but i'm excited to start patching in the evening. i think i am going to primarily focus on creating patches inside of touch designer, a node-based platform for creating mostly visual things. i've been wanting to delve deeper into it since making the patch that became a zine called "vessels," so i hope this will be the opportunity/motivation for me to take the time to do so.

i am writing this without my glasses on, because they've been irritating my nose. the downside to this is that i can't see shit. oh well, pardon any typos.

last weekend, as i mentioned in my last entry, we went to upstate NY to play a show and stayed for a three-day weekend in a house that our friends rented. i am from an area near where we went, and i've never felt what it's like to experience the area as a "tourist" until now. it was surprisingly nice despite the irony! we went to a lake, and lots of nice coffee shops and bookstores, and two very good restaurants. i did feel like i was cosplaying, and it was kind of funny. the show was also very nice — i already wrote a bit about it for my blog post, which i linked to earlier in this paragraph, and which also contains a recording of our set.

when we got home, i went back into a busy work week and found that my fabrication order had been delivered. it was the last mystery object for zine club, and it's still too soon to risk spoiling the surprise, but i was very pleased with the results. i prepared and mailed out all of the shipments, and in the process, i officially launched my new project, AV club, which is replacing zine club moving forward. so far, i've only shared it with the zine club member list, and i haven't posted about it anywhere else yet, but already we have 15 members. yay!

i started reading a book called wisdom wide and deep by shaila catherine, which is about concentration practice in buddhism. it's been a while since i've done much reading on the topic, though i have continued to practice meditation somewhat regularly. so far in the book, everything i've read is stuff that i've heard multiple times before, but i have enjoyed this particular wording of it. reading about buddhist teachings is very interesting because it feels like you can read the same thing each year and get something completely different out of it. so far in this book, i've been reading about the five hindrances, and noticing how much of what i would have previously categorized as 'desire' now seems to me to actually be 'restlessness.' hmm...

there is a very intense heat wave happening in my area this week. we have a window AC unit, which, when run continuously on max, has just barely brought the temperature in our home down to 85ºF (30ºC). i hate running it for so long each day, because it's loud and sapping up all our electricity. but it's been 100ºF outside for four days, and it sadly doesn't seem optional (except at night, when i've just been opening the windows and pointing a lot of fans at myself). i also have been spending less time outside, and exercising less, because the temperature is making me lethargic. i hope it breaks soon, because my health is not being helped by this.

today, i braved the heat to visit a friend who's leaving tomorrow to travel for three months. i was glad that we got to hang out before she left. i set up a ghost instance (open source newsletter software) on my server for her to write about her trip, and keep me and other people updated on here whereabouts. having just set up the ghost instance for AV club last month, the tool was fresh in my mind. i like it ok so far, and it seems practical. i wish more people would use RSS, but for better or worse, i guess that email is much more widely used now for subscribing to things.

ok, it's getting late, and time for me to stop trying to look at things without my glasses on. good night!

things have been pretty normal. it feels like there isn't much to write about, but it's a good exercise to think about what happened anyway.

i went back to the city for one last AV gig of the season, and had a fancy meal with my friend who i stay with most often there. it was the fanciest meal that i've ever gone out to by my own initiative (usually in my life, when i've ended up at fancy restaurants, it was because other people wanted to, and it wasn't my preferred choice.) it was very good, and all of the calories i expended lugging projectors around were replenished.

i have a project i've been working on that i haven't announced yet, so i'll call it project X. i knew that i needed to be ready to launch project X by the end of the month, and also make some good progress on a website i'm building for an artist friend. and i also knew i was going on a trip for the last weekend of the month (that's tomorrow!), so i spent the previous weekend hunkering down and working a lot on both. but i also went to weird music night on saturday, and a movie theater on sunday, both with andrei. we saw the furious, a new martial arts movie, and we enjoyed it. (it is violent though, so if you see it, be warned: they spend more time hitting each other than not.)

besides that, we also went for some hikes and walks. and we went to another movie on wednesday night, but it wasn't good. i finished watching battlestar galactica, which i started last august. i liked it overall, but

after a few months of shifting things around my sporadic gigs in the city, i have returned to my default four-day schedule at my art studio job. thor, the dog who belongs to the artists i work for, got sick this week, and i ended up having to take him to the animal hospital. thankfully, he seems ok now. i have been doing some rather rote inventory management, but i got to dive into some rhino and grasshopper stuff to revise a design for compatibility with autocad file formats, which was an enjoyable challenge for me. (turns out ellipses are bad, but arcs are fine. i learned about how to create multiple tangent arcs to approximate ellipses. my online research brought me into the history of stonemasonry.)

tomorrow, we're going on a trip to upstate new york, and we are going to do a live performance on saturday, and spend the weekend with our friends (one of whom is also performing) in the woods. so i'm looking forward to that. i am not sure how "chill" of a trip it can be since we do have to play that show, but i'm going to try to take it as easy as possible, and start reading at least one new book. i probably won't do any hiking, because i have a strain in my foot arch and knee. and i want to rest, because when i get home, it will be a busy week. i will have to mail out a mysterious object, and i get to announce project X!

wow, i am so tired. it is sunday night, after a very eventful weekend. my younger sibling came to visit me, and we went to a very large thrift store in my area. we spent three hours there, and i obtained at least a year's worth of new clothes. my younger sibling is my personal fashion consultant, so it was helpful to have them with me in that process. in particular, i got a lot of light, flowy, natural-fiber clothing, to help me cope with the hot weather. they also helped me cull and organize my wardrobe in general. i have a bag of things to donate, and more space for the new things i found. i'm actually excited to wear my clothes now, which i must say i haven't felt in a pretty long time.

we also did some bleach dyeing with another friend who came over to hang out. i did my usual bleach-dyeing technique, which involves throwing splatters of bleach randomly onto my clothes and hoping they come out cool. but my sibling and friend both did very careful, intricate designs that they painted onto the clothing with a brush. even though it was both of their first time trying doing it, the results were very cool, and i think i'll try it too next time, in addition to my random splashing.

today, my sibling left, and my partner returned from a 2 week family trip to alaska. so we went on a long walk together and caught up. it was pretty hot again today, for the fourth day in a row, but i read that it's supposed to cool off tomorrow. i hope the cooler weather leaves me feeling a bit less drained...

i went to the city to work some AV gigs. i helped set up screens for a tent event at the central park zoo. i had not been there before. we were working near the sea lion enclosure, and they were watching us with curiosity.

i was traveling very light, which was nice. besides a change of clothes and toothbrush, i just brought my e-ink tablet and my phone with some locally downloaded episodes of battlestar galactica. between working, sleeping, and hanging out with friends, the only time i had to kill was the train ride itself. so i decided not to even pretend i was going to get anything done!

i got back pretty late last night, but decided to go to my other job early today anyway, to force my sleep schedule back towards "normal" (it hasn't been the same since my trip to mexico). well, i think it worked, because i am extremely tired.

i was reading an article earlier about how many people entering college today do not have the basic reading and writing skills that would have been taken for granted in decades of the recent past. i was thinking about how both AI and the whole shortform video content thing are perfect allies in destroying people's brains. i also don't want to assume the smugness of a person who says, "i'm smarter than you all because i do not do these things." it's such a strange time, and god knows the youth will figure out their own way to have intellectual lives... i hope.

anyway, i'm going to keep reading and writing, and where it makes sense, creating diagrams and other visual aids. i won't read my writing aloud to make it more accessible to people, for better or worse. the only videos i make will be long, weird, and, as a critic (like, an actual art critic) once described my work: "challenging to the attention span."

p.s. the article about people not knowing how to read had a typo.

i went to another art opening today! this time it was one that i was in. it was curated by my friend kit, who is also my neighbor, and it was at our local community art space which is called ely center.

the title of the exhibition is restructuring realities, and it's all video work, much of it analog, glitch-based, or abstract. kit put so much work into putting it all together, and scrounged up all of the equipment from friends and his own collection. for a show with 15 video works, that was no small feat.

since i haven't been very active since i got back from my trip, i decided to walk there and back. it was a little bit warm out but it was a nice walk nonetheless. i saw a lot of people in their sunday clothes, including some people standing in front of the masonic lodge wearing tuxedos, and a parade truck covered in people protesting yale's tax evasion. i walked a total of 6 or 7 miles.

i went an art opening at a museum today, which the artists i work for had some work in. my favorite art that i saw was actually in a book in the gift shop, of works by an artist named karla knight.

i am slightly jetlagged, but i stayed up later last night than could be justified by that alone. i actually was obsessively working on a new project, which i will talk more specifically about soon. so i ended up going to bed when it was getting light out.

miraculously, i wasn't tempted to keep working on it today, so i was able to do more normal human things such as clean my house. i also didn't have an energy crash, which was also lucky. i think i've gotten past the "proof of concept" phase of the project i was working on. i think the reason i spent so much time on it yesterday is because that phase is very addictive. successfully doing something you weren't sure would work can be very gratifying. now the rest of the project is just leg work and stuff i already know i can do, which is a bit less exciting. and that's actually a good thing because i have a few other things that really should have been in front of it in the queue.

i spent the past week in mexico, visiting my parents, who officially moved there this year. it was my first time visiting guanajuato, the city where they now live. it is a very interesting place; it's an old city nestled between mountains in the high desert (at 7000 feet / 2300 meters in altitude). there are many mazelike alleys that are only accessible by foot, as they are narrow, steep, and riddled with cobbled stairs. i was glad my parents came to meet me when i arrived, because it would have been very difficult for me to find the unmarked door of their building on my own.

from the roof of their apartment, and in many other high points in the city, you can see the dense arrangement of centuries-old buildings, stacked practically on top one another as they ascend the slopes of the surrounding mountains. to supplement the few streets which had been built wide enough to accomodate carriages, a dense, equally complex network of tunnes was excavated beneath the city at the beginning of the period where cars became prevalent.

i'm not sure if it's lucky (for structural integrity) or unlucky (for the tunnel builders who bored though it), but most of the ground there is solid rock. my understanding is that the town was originally built around mining, and that it once was the world's capital of silver (citation needed). there is also a long tradition of stone carving, which you can see in carved architectural details everywhere.

one of the most interesting visual things i noticed was the contrast between the grandness of the older architecture and the chaos of later modifications, often equally represented in the same structure. in accordance with mexican tradition, the solution to every building problem is: more cement. need a new bench or shelf? need to prevent ATVs from squishing a soft plastic hose that serves as the water line to an entire building? need to re-attach an errant tile or stone? more cement!

i spent a lot of time walking around, and we had a small party with my parents' friends, and saw some live music performances. i also explored the area around the reservoirs with a new friend, and went to a figure drawing club and made some other new friends (it was a club where everyone takes turns modeling), and saw the editor of a newspaper i used to write for when i was a kid (who now lives there too).

i didn't bring my laptop with me, and though i did do a little bit of internet research for an upcoming project, it was a rare time where i stepped away from almost all of my usual business. now i'm back home, and getting back into it all...